


i was drawn by the fire

by postcardmystery



Category: Justified
Genre: Gen, Murder, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-15
Updated: 2012-10-15
Packaged: 2017-11-16 09:46:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/538158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The birds call, high and long, and his face is scraped and his fingernails lined with calligraphies of black, and if God does not speak to him with the voice of the hollers, He does not speak to him at all.</p><p>Boyd-stays-a-preacher AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i was drawn by the fire

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for blood and murder.

The thing he hates most about jail is the smell. Clean antiseptic and the scent of fear-caused sweat, human but not animal, wild but not feral, his jumpsuit buttoned up tight and a star carved into his chest, signed in his best friend’s hand. It is never silent, and it is never cold. He keeps his hands in his pockets and his tongue sharp and hot. Jail smells wrong, feels wrong, and he paces his cage, prays for that clawing fire in his chest, dreams through sleepless, dark, dark nights.

His face is bruised and his chest is bruised and his soul is firewhite burnt, and everything, everything is just matter of waiting, perspective, time.

 

His Daddy leaves him in the woods, and he pulls off his shoes, feels the dirt teem with life beneath his feet, breathes out. He lies down on the forest floor and stretches out, stays there until his hands turn blue and his hair is thick with filth. The birds call, high and long, and his face is scraped and his fingernails lined with calligraphies of black, and if God does not speak to him with the voice of the hollers, He does not speak to him at all.

 

“You ain’t no preacher,” says Raylan, and it’s condescending, final, and more than a little fond. There’s an edge to it, of a man whose God is distant and not kind.

“That ain’t up to you, Raylan,” says Boyd, heavy with truth and love and the weight of divine expectations, and Raylan lowers his gun, grins, his eyes red and his mouth tight, and does not click the safety off.

 

They come for him, and they come for him, and they come for him.

He wears no gun and he wears no collar, one presumed and the other ignored every single time. He spits out Bible verses like ammunition and walks his forest like a ghost. Dead men follow with him, but then, there’s more than dirt on his hands. He is not afraid and is wracked with it, wrecked beneath the moonlight and the heavy heat and the rain. He can’t remember what it is to be afraid. He whispers to the forests and he hears his name. His Daddy asks for him, and he does not answer. He does not know how.

“Repent, and ye shall be set free,” he says, he says, he says, sees Raylan Givens’s mocking eyes, has a cross carved by a saint’s hands into his chest, feels no fear, and begins to forget his burdens.

 

“Get them gun thugs outta my house,” says Ava Crowder, hair the gold of angelfire and her eyes painted with sins he does not know how to absolve, and he pulls at a collar done up too tight, finds his hands holding a shotgun like holy water, stands square in the door of his dead brother’s house, snarls, “You ain’t welcome here no more, boys.”

“You ain’t nothin’ but a two-bit Jesus-freak,” says the stupidest one, and Boyd finds that fire, cocks his shotgun, says, “My God ain’t f’you to question, son.”

“Your God can suck my cock,” says Johnny, and Boyd drags out a smile he hasn’t seen in a mirror in months, says, “You got ten seconds, cuz.”

“Or what—” says Johnny, but it’s not a sentence he’s ever going to need to finish.

“My Daddy ain’t got God on his side,” says Boyd, Johnny’s blood on his bare feet and the shotgun hot in his hands, “You boys interested in findin’ out what that’s like?”

 

His church grows, and grows, and grows. There’s nothing Christ loves like a sinner, and there’s nothing Boyd loves like forgiveness. His hands aren’t clean but there’s thirty men at his back and angelhair at his side. Before battle, he blesses them. God speaks to him from the valleys and mountains, from the streams and the sky. His tongue finds the words to speak, and what speaks through him is holy. He does the Lord’s work, and if it’s not good, it’s better than nothing at all.

 

“Heard your Daddy ain’t too happy with you,” says Raylan, and Boyd fingers the collar slit, black and white, across his adam’s apple, says, “Which one?”


End file.
